Ohio proposal would offer paid leave for new parents

Madison Greenspan, a small business owner in Cleveland, said the early arrival of her twin daughters eventually pushed her to leave her previous job, even though she chose to return to work just three weeks after undergoing a C-section.

“When it takes 45 and 65 days for your children to come home from the hospital, you start doing the math in your head and making some really hard choices,” Greenspan said. “We are forcing parents to make the impossible decision to be there for their NICU babies or to keep their jobs to be able to take care of those babies when they come home.”

Greenspan said Ohio should not force new parents to choose between caring for their families and keeping their jobs. She is pushing for Senate Bill 396, sponsored by state Senators Beth Liston (D-Dublin) and Louis Blessing III (R-Colerain Twp), which would offer up to 14 weeks of paid, job-protected leave for Ohioans who have recently given birth, adopted, or started fostering children. The proposal would also cover workers who need time off to care for sick loved ones or who are dealing with a long-term illness.

“Millions in our state are faced with this type of situation,” Liston said. “In fact, I would argue that almost everybody is faced with a situation like this at some point, whether it’s related to a new birth, a family member that’s sick at home, a new health diagnosis that they have. It’s really hard to recover from a financial hit of taking an unpaid leave.”

Blessing said 77% of Ohio workers do not receive any form of paid leave from their employers. S.B. 396 would establish a paid leave fund in the Ohio Treasury, managed by the Department of Job and Family Services. Both employers and employees would contribute about 0.4 percent of payroll to support the fund.

Employers that already offer more generous paid family leave could opt out of the state program, as could small businesses with fewer than 15 employees. However, employees would still pay into the state fund and remain eligible for state-provided leave.

Fourteen other states have already adopted some form of guaranteed paid family leave, most recently Virginia. Blessing and Liston presented their proposal as a way to tackle two major challenges in Ohio—the difficulty of maintaining a strong workforce and the state’s persistently high infant mortality rate.